CALL ME ISHMAEL

'Incredibly rare' white whale spotted off NSW could be offspring of Australia's beloved Migaloo

Romy Gilbert, Apr 22 2022

Rare new vision of an all white humpback whale captured by a Queensland teen has sparked speculation Australia's beloved Migaloo may have reproduced.

Rare new vision of an all white humpback whale captured by a Queensland teen has sparked speculation Australia's beloved Migaloo may have reproduced.

Brayden Blake spotted the white whale about 500 metres off the coast of Fingal Head, while holidaying in New South Wales on Thursday.

The 16-year-old instantly thought of the famed whale Migaloo, who hasn't been seen yet this season, but marine expert Dr Wally Franklin thinks the "extremely intriguing" footage could indicate an even more impressive sight - a new albino white whale.

"If it is Migaloo, he's the only albino whale in the eastern Australian group, which now numbers over 40,000 whales and if it's a younger white whale, that'd only be two out of 40,000," Franklin told 9News.com.au

"So it's an incredibly rare occurrence.

"This is the first time that I've been able to say that the white whale I'm looking at could be a white whale other than Migaloo.”

Brayden does drone shark surveillance for Surf Live Saving NSW and couldn't believe his eyes when he saw a white whale splashing in the water.

BRAYDEN BLAKE/NINE
The white whale was seen frolicking with dolphins off the coast of NSW.

He raced home to grab his personal drone to nab some footage, which has led to the potentially new discovery being pursued by experts.

"My heart was racing ... it was just really, really cool," Brayden told 9News.com.au.

"I was so lucky to see it."

The whale can be seen frolicking with a pod of dolphins in footage exclusively obtained by 9News.

Franklin said there is a strong chance this white whale may follow in Migaloo's footsteps and show up in Queensland's Hervey Bay, as Migaloo did in 1992.

DR WALLY FRANKLIN/NINE
Dr Wally Franklin said this is the first time he's seen a white whale and is not convinced it's Migaloo.

'Distinctive' markings used as 'fingerprint' to identify whales

While Franklin believes the new discovery is remarkable, he said at this stage "we are not close enough to affirm the individuality of the whale".

However, he said there are several things that indicate the whale is not Migaloo and instead a potential offspring.

One hint could be the timing of this sighting as younger whales are believed to begin their migration from Antarctica to Queensland before older ones.

"The timing of the sighting is consistent with it being a younger whale, because it's still very early in the season," Franklin said.

He said normally Migaloo turns up in late June, early July.

"He's been very consistent with those initial sightings so that could be a good indication that this might be a second white whale, which in itself would be quite incredible," the marine scientist said.

Franklin has been able to identify Migaloo from photographs of his dorsal fin, "which has quite a distinctive shape".

"Along the backbone of the humpback whale, the knobs of the backbone do often show," he said.

"In in the case of Migaloo, he has two distinctive knobs on his backbone, relative to the dorsal.

BRAYDEN BLAKE/NINE
A 16-year-old boy has captured new vision of a white whale, believed to potentially be Migaloo's offspring.

"You've got to be able to photograph the dorsal on the back, which you can get because he does tend to flick up when he rises up out of the water.”

"The trailing edge of his flute has a very distinctive shape as well because humpback whales have a serrated edge to their tale flute and that's quite unique.

"Humpbacks are the only whale out of the 80 odd species that have a serrated edge.

"It is like a fingerprint."

The new vision comes as major news to experts and Migaloo fans abroad, with Franklin believing there to be more opportunities this whale watching season for people to view the spectacular animal.

"There will be opportunities for other people to sight him, possibly photograph him."

However, due to the hype that came about when the famous white Migaloo was first spotted in 1991, the Queensland government implemented legislation which aimed to protect him and any whale of his kind.

Queensland law requires that Migaloo, or any white whale, be given 500 metres of space under a Special Management Declaration.

DR WALLY FRANKLIN/NINE
A photo of Migaloo taken by Dr Dan Burns off Ballina in 2004.

Who is Migaloo?

The all white was first pictured on June 28, 1991 passing Byron Bay.

The indigenous community in Queensland used the world "migaloo" to describe a "white fella" – sparking the name that's now been heard around the world. At the time he was the only documented all-white whale on the planet.

Skin samples were collected from Migaloo in 2004, which allowed researchers from Southern Cross University Whale Research Centre to confirm he is a male born in 1986.

He's been sighted along the east coast of Australia with another whale known as Milo, which provided "valuable insight into the migratory behaviour of humpback whales" along Australia's coast.

This story was originally published on 9News.com.au and is republished with permission.

 

Watch: Chinese scientists develop ‘robot rat’ to assist in post-disaster rescue missions

The robot rat is expected to provide assistance in spaces that are too narrow for rescuers to reach.

Scroll Staff

• 
  

Germany to Evict Existing Afghan Refugees for Clearing Out Accommodation Centres for Arriving Ukrainians

April 22, 2022

© Cineberg Ug | Dreamstime.com

German authorities are displacing existing refugees to make way for those coming from Ukraine, as several Afghan nationals have revealed.

Miriam Arween, a social activist from Afghanistan, says she was having breakfast with her family when a social worker knocked on her door and said they had to clear out the place for arriving refugees from Ukraine without questions of negotiations and within the next 24 hours, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

“The evictions purposefully weren’t publicised. Some people had lived in their homes for years and were ripped out of their social structures, including children who were moved to locations far from their respective schools,” Tareq Alaows, a board member of the Berlin Refugee Council – a collaboration of different organisations that aim to improve refugees living conditions.

On the other hand, as Alaows points out, the government justified the actions by saying the time had come anyway for Afghan refugees to leave as “arrival centres” were meant for short-term stays. But there were families living in such centres for years now, while other families evicted were living in other accommodation spots rather than arrival centres.

“Few people’s living conditions improved, but most were afraid to speak up, afraid it could impact their immigration status,” Alaows said, pointing out that around ten residences had been emptied in Berlin for the arriving refugees.

In addition, he points out that this situation doesn’t have to do with Ukrainians but rather with Germany’s solidarity if it is only targeting certain people, also saying that recent months demonstrated that refugees could be treated differently, implying the EU and Germany were particularly friendly to refugees from Ukraine.

On the other end, the decision made by Berlin’s Senate Department for Integration, Labor, and Social Services showed that the measure was “based on operationally necessary and difficult considerations,” and there were no other options.

“We regret that this caused additional hardships to the Afghan families [and that] the affected people had to move out of their familiar surroundings and now possibly have to keep up with their social connections with great difficulty,” the department’s press secretary, Stefan Strauss, said

He also noted there were 83 accommodation spots for refugees in Berlin – which accommodated 22,000 people, but those had to be cleared out as more Ukrainian refugees were arriving. In addition, the department’s secretary said that instead, evicted Afghans were granted other “permanent” accommodation with similar living conditions.

However, Foreign Policy points out that although Arween and her family had been moved to a slightly better apartment, there are other issues to be tackled. For example, the new place is believed to be an accommodating spot for homeless people, and some residents even have criminal backgrounds, which leaves the mother of a five-year-old and an infant of eight months concerned about their safety.

UN refugee agency ‘shocked’ at Rohingya deaths in Malaysia escape

Six people, including two children, were killed trying to cross a highway after hundreds fled a detention centre amid a riot.

More than 500 Rohingya fled immigration detention in Malaysia on Wednesday but most were recaptured within hours [AFP]

Published On 22 Apr 2022

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has said it is “shocked and deeply saddened” by the deaths of six Rohingya, including two children, who died on Wednesday in an escape this week from a temporary immigration detention centre in northern Malaysia.

The group was among 528 Rohingya people who fled the facility in the early hours of Wednesday morning after what authorities said was a riot.

KEEP READING
Six killed as hundreds of Rohingya flee Malaysia detentionlist 
Rights groups slam India for deporting Rohingya woman to Myanmar
Bangladesh shuts school in Rohingya camp set up by slain leader
Rohingya in Bangladesh welcome US calling repression genocide


The UNHCR, which has an office in Kuala Lumpur, said in a statement late on Thursday, that it was also concerned about the incident that led to the escape.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority who have long been persecuted in Myanmar, have sought safety in Malaysia with many risking dangerous boat journeys to get to the country following a brutal military crackdown in 2017 that is now the subject of an international genocide case.

The UN refugee agency said it did not have any information regarding the incident or the individuals involved, and revealed that it had not been allowed to access any immigration detention centres in Malaysia since August 2019.

“This has unfortunately prevented UNHCR in seeing detained persons of concern in order to determine those in need of international protection and to advocate for their release,” the statement said, noting that there are “detained persons of concern, including vulnerable individuals, requiring our attention” in immigration detention centres across Malaysia.

It said it was ready to work with the Malaysian government on alternatives to detention, especially for children and the elderly.

“Depriving individuals of their liberty in order to deter others from entering the country is unlawful, inhumane and ineffective,” the statement said. “Seeking asylum is not an unlawful act. In all cases detention should be a measure of last resort, should be authorized by the law and only undertaken if necessary and reasonable in all the circumstances, and proportionate to a legitimate aim.”

The six people who died were killed as they tried to cross the North-South Highway, the main road that links northern Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

The immigration department said most of the group was rearrested hours after they escaped, but police continue to search for nearly 100 people who remain free.

Some 664 people were in the centre at the time of the disturbances, 137 of them children, Malaysia’s home minister Hamzah Zainudin told local media on Wednesday. The Rohingya had arrived by sea in 2020 and had been transferred from the resort island of Langkawi, he added.

“Because there were so many detainees in a cramped space, things got out of control and the detainees took the opportunity to break out,” Hamzah said.

Some 181,000 people in Malaysia are officially registered as refugees and asylum seekers, according to the UN, and about 57 percent of them are Rohingya. Like many countries in the region, Malaysia does not recognise the UN Refugee Convention and those caught without papers are considered “illegal” migrants.

“Even before the incident, many of these refugees would have already been undergoing huge trauma, having escaped a genocide against them in Myanmar,” Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, said in a statement. “Malaysian authorities must not only treat them with compassion but also get to the bottom of what triggered the incident.”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

India's Muslims face genocide. But don't expect Boris Johnson to mention it

Under Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, India has embarked on a dark path - and the UK knows it. Yet a potential trade deal will ensure Johnson's silence on the matter

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Indian counterpart

 Narendra Modi meet at Hyderabad House in New Delhi on 22 April 2022 (AFP)

Peter Oborne
22 April 2022 

There’s something that makes me sick in the stomach about Boris Johnson’s trip to India.

We’ve seen the obligatory pictures of Johnson on a rickshaw. We’ve read the carefully briefed articles by lobby correspondents about differences with Narendra Modi over Russia and Ukraine.

We’ve not read a word from the British press about Modi’s systematic, organised, murderous persecution of India's 200 million Muslims

We’ve studied the photos of a relaxed Johnson briefing a huddle of British journalists on his plane. And being received by an official delegation getting off the plane. And, of course, we’ve read the informed speculation that a trade deal will be struck.

But we’ve not read a word from the British press about Modi’s systematic, organised, murderous persecution of India’s 200 million Muslims. And I’d be astonished if we hear a word on the subject.

On Wednesday, Johnson arrived in Gujarat, Modi’s political base. He announced new India investment deals in science and technology. A routine exchange of political favours. But the British prime minister courteously made no reference to the Gujarat pogrom, which left more than 1,000 dead 20 years ago, with Modi accused of fanning the violence.

If this terrible event had been an isolated episode, fair enough. But it has gone on to set the pattern for Modi’s premiership.

Anti-Muslim narrative

In the eight years he has been Indian prime minister, Modi has repudiated the multi-faith India embraced by the nation’s founding fathers, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Remember that Modi has been a member of the Nazi-influenced Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), out of which his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has grown, since he was a boy.

Under his leadership, a terrifying anti-Muslim narrative has emerged. Modi’s BJP follows a Hindu nationalism that sees India’s 200 million Muslims as foreigners and invaders.

For Indian Muslims the end times have arrived 

Read More »

Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning novelist, has recently claimed that the situation for Indian Muslims is approaching genocidal and that India may be broken up.

In December, an event was held in the northern Uttarakhand state at which participants urged the mass killings of Muslims. "Even if just a hundred of us become soldiers and kill two million of them, we will be victorious," one woman said about Indian Muslims. A video of the event went viral.

The meeting was attended by at least one member of Modi’s BJP. Another delegate, Prabodhanand Giri, often photographed with senior BJP members, declared that "like Myanmar, the police, politicians, the army and every Hindu in India must pick up weapons and do this cleansing".

As in other countries, the government and sections of the media accuse Muslims of disloyalty. In a farcical case in point, Indian Muslims were arrested for celebrating Pakistan’s cricketing defeat of India in November 2021.
A dark path

The Indian government is seeking to alter the demography of India’s Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, by encouraging Hindus to move there. The state has been under a dense military occupation for decades; most Kashmiris do not wish to be part of India. In August 2019, Prime Minister Modi revoked Kashmir’s historical semi-autonomous status.

That same year, Modi’s Citizen Amendment Act excluded Muslim refugees from citizenship. Arundhati Roy wrote that Modi was enacting “India’s version of Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews and other minorities of their citizenship rights”.

Muslims break their fast at the Jama Masjid mosque during Islam's Holy month of Ramadan in the old quarters of Delhi on 13 April, 2022 (AFP)

There is no doubt that India under Modi has embarked on a dark path. The BJP's president, Amit Shah, has compared migrants from Bangladesh to "termites", drawing comparisons with Nazi language about Jews in the 1930s or the language used about the Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Gregory Stanton, the founder and director of Genocide Watch, recently warned the US Congress there were early “signs and processes” of genocide in the Indian state of Assam and Indian-administered Kashmir. Stanton, who warned about the Rwandan genocide three years before it happened in 1994, drew parallels between Modi’s policies and Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya Muslims ahead of the 2017 slaughter.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States is on record as stating that India is the second most likely country to experience mass killings in 2022. Total silence about this from the British government, and the accompanying press party.

Threat of genocide

To be fair, Boris Johnson is in India to bring home a trade deal, and he cannot afford to jeopardise that cherished prize. Nor can we reasonably expect the United Kingdom to solve all of the world’s problems.

Nevertheless, in high-profile negotiations of this sort, I think it is fair to expect a British prime minister to raise concerns about India’s treatment of Muslims, highlight them publicly and report back not just to the British parliament but also to the international community.

Johnson can’t claim ignorance. Modi’s assault on Muslims is well-documented by the relevant international organisations

All the more so because Johnson can’t claim ignorance. Modi’s assault on Muslims is well-documented by the relevant international organisations. We can therefore be confident that the British High Commission in Delhi, however silent, knows all about it. British foreign correspondents, too.

In Johnson’s defence, Labour leader Keir Starmer has been silent, too. He did not raise the persecution of India’s Muslims when he had the chance at yesterday’s prime minister's questions. To sum up, this week, Boris Johnson stepped foot in Narendra Modi’s India. It contains 1.4 billion souls, 200 million of whom are Muslims. According to good judges, under Modi they face the threat of genocide.

Yet not a word from Johnson, his Labour opponent Starmer, or the British political press.

Research for this piece by Mahdi Mustafa

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Daniel Ellsberg on the Existential Threat of Global Conflict

“As the world has correctly perceived, this has the seeds of a regional nuclear war and all-out war between the US and Russia.”

By Sasha Abramsky

Daniel Ellsberg receives the the 7th International Peace Prize at the Semper Opera in Dresden, Germany, February 2016. (Arno Burgi / picture alliance via Getty Images)

Arguably no human on earth has given more thought over the past 65 years to the possibilities of nuclear war—intentional or accidental—than Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Since Ellsberg joined the RAND Corporation as an analyst in 1958, he has accumulated a vast wealth of knowledge and perspective on how superpowers use their nuclear muscle to impose their will on the world, and on how their political and military elites strategize about conflicts in the nuclear era.

In 1971, horrified by the trajectory of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. More recently, in 2017, he published a book, The Doomsday Machine, revealing secret US nuclear strategies—several of which, in the 1960s, Ellsberg himself was involved in crafting—and acts dating back to the dawn of the Cold War.

Last year, I interviewed Ellsberg, who lives in Berkeley, when he turned 90. On Monday, we resumed our conversation. Over the course of one and a half hours we discussed Ellsberg’s understanding of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of hostilities between China and Taiwan as a spillover effect, the risk of nuclear bombs being unleashed, and the potentially cataclysmic impact the war could have on the ability of the global community to cooperate on anti-climate-change policies.

Ellsberg was adamant that this was a brutal and unjustified war of aggression launched by Putin. But he was incredulous at the notion, too often accepted as a given by commentators, that no superpower since the end of World War II has committed such heinous atrocities. “I’m 91,” he says. “So, I’m burdened by an awful lot of historical analogies in my lifetime, many of which I participated in: the buildup of nuclear weapons, and the Vietnam War, which were moral catastrophes. Putin is a bad guy, very clearly. His aggression is murderous and as illegitimate as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.” He pauses. “Or the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq. Or Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam by the US—we haven’t reached that level remotely yet [in Ukraine.]”

Ellsberg specifically mentioned the use of phosphorous bombs, which burn through to the bone, by the United States and its allies in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and napalm used against civilians in Vietnam. Then, going back to World War II and the all-out effort to defeat fascism, he spoke of allied bombing raids that deliberately created firestorms in Dresden and Hamburg—killing tens of thousands of civilians in single nights in the two German cities—as well as a raid against Berlin, in February 1945, which failed to generate a firestorm but still killed roughly 25,000 people. He detailed the bombing of 64 cities in Japan before the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that cumulatively killed roughly 900,000 people—including up to 120,000 who died in Tokyo in a firestorm created by saturation bombing.

“The atom bomb didn’t change the policy of trying to kill as many people as possible; it just made it cheaper and more efficient,” Ellsberg argued.

As the US and the USSR built up their nuclear arsenals in the first four decades of the nuclear era, they developed launch-on-warning policies that could send ICBMs hurtling toward their targets in response not to bombs exploding but to satellite systems sending a warning signal that they had identified incoming missiles. The planet balanced on the edge of an abyss. As Ellsberg and others have documented, several times the world came within a whisker of an accidental nuclear war based on faulty readings from these warning systems.

Now, in 2022, with Europe once more witnessing a catastrophic land war, with Putin having put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert, and with Ukrainian forces humbling Russia’s conventional army, Ellsberg is desperately concerned that things could spiral out of control, and the Great Powers could topple into the abyss.

He is furious at the shortsighted policies pushed by George W. Bush’s administration, and continued by the administrations that came after, to expand NATO east onto Russia’s flank. He quotes Cold War theorist George Kennan’s warning that such an expansion was “a fateful error,” the most historic blunder since the end of the Cold War, arguing that it made it almost certain that a humiliated Russia would turn toward nationalism and militarism. In dangling the prospect of NATO membership before Ukraine’s government, even if NATO didn’t actually want the country as a member, Washington was, Ellsberg came to feel, deliberately tempting Russia to intervene.

Ellsberg is worried that a reinvigorated NATO, and a military-industrial complex champing at the bit to sell ever more weapons—both to sustain Ukraine in resisting invasion, and, if it were to be successfully occupied, to make possible years of insurgency—in combination with a revanchist and paranoid Russia, could plunge the world into years of conflict.

“It can get a lot worse, and it almost certainly will get a lot worse,” he says, as he contemplates a war that is being broadcast by the minute into homes across the world, further inflaming public opinion in the west. “Committing these crimes on television has made it an irreversible split between the US and Russia.”

Ellsberg argues that a critical mass of ordinary Americans are paying attention to, and being morally outraged by, the “demolition” of a democratic, mainly white, and mainly Christian country in a way that past wars didn’t—particularly those launched by the US against non-white, non-Christian, non-democratic countries over recent decades. The loss of life and destruction of infrastructure in say, Iraq, a country long dictatorially ruled by Saddam Hussein, didn’t register emotionally with many Americans the way that today’s war in Ukraine has. “You’ve got this split in the world now that we’ve been moving toward for decades. And that means global collaboration on climate change, and reducing nuclear weapons, looks to me out of possibility. Without huge collaboration with the US and China and India and Russia, climate catastrophes are going to happen.”

More immediately, Ellsberg fears that the taboo against using nuclear weapons in a regional war is on the verge of being breached. If that happens, he says, it could easily precipitate a Mad Max era of “small nuclear wars,” with dozens of countries rapidly acquiring nuclear capabilities in a desperate effort to fend off atomic bullies in their geographical vicinity. “An era of proliferation may be underway already.”

“As the world has correctly perceived, this has the seeds of a regional nuclear war and all-out war between the US and Russia,” Ellsberg said.

In Putin’s threats of nuclear attack against those who would intervene to defend Ukraine, Ellsberg sees echoes of Nixon’s self-proclaimed “madman strategy,” in which he periodically let the Vietnamese know that he was actively considering exploding nuclear weapons on their country if they didn’t back down. So, too, he sees echoes of Eisenhower’s declared willingness to launch a nuclear war against the Chinese during the early days of Mao’s rule; and the Strategic Air Command’s determination, documented in Ellsberg’s book, that, in the event of a US-Soviet nuclear conflict, in addition to targeting all major Soviet cities, US forces would also be ordered to launch nuclear attacks on all major Chinese population centers.

The nonagenarian, who has dedicated decades of his life to warning of the dangers of nuclear warfare, believes that the war in Ukraine could also lead to a series of events that culminates in a Chinese-US conflict. Here’s how it goes, he explains: China has always said that if Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway province, formally declares independence, it would invade. To avoid provoking a conflict, the United States has never officially recognized Taiwan’s sovereignty. Now, however, looking at how Russia has treated Ukraine, there’s a growing drumbeat in Taiwan to declare independence and at the same time to obtain security guarantees from Western powers to protect its sovereignty; and there’s a growing cadre of US political figures willing to treat Taiwan as a sovereign power and issue those guarantees.

“Both the Taiwanese and Chinese have to be drawing lessons from Ukraine, hour by hour,” says Ellsberg. “Putin thinks of Ukraine as part of Russia, and Ukraine as having illegitimately seceded. From his point of view he’s conducting a civil war; he’s Lincoln, who doesn’t want to accept secession. Every leader of China since Mao has said ‘one China,’ and ‘Taiwan is a province of China. And Taiwan is acting as if it wants to secede, and we will not accept it.’” In such a context, he says recognizing Taiwan would be “insane. I can’t see anyone would see a silver lining to that, except people who want to sell more weapons to Taiwan.”

Ellsberg has spent decades shouting from the rooftops to get humanity to change its course when it comes to existential threats from nuclear weaponry and climate change. Now, with Ukraine ablaze, he is deeply pessimistic. “Eliminate ICBMs? That ship has sailed—and it has sailed into iceberg waters at full speed at night, just like the Titanic. On climate, I think we’ve hit the iceberg. I think that this invasion, which was never certain and never necessary, and could have been averted, has shut the door on averting the traps we have set for our species.”


Sasha Abramsky writes regularly for The Nation, is the author of several books, including Inside Obama’s Brain, The American Way of Poverty, The House of 20,000 Books, Jumping at Shadows, and, most recently, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar. Subscribe to The Abramsky Report, a weekly, subscription-based political column, here.

COINCIDENCE? NO SUCH THING

Two Russian oligarchs found dead one day apart alongside their wives and children

22 April 2022

Sergei Protosenya, left, was found dead in Spain alongside his family. Vladislav Avayev, right, was found dead in Moscow. Picture: Facebook/Social media

By Asher McShane

@ashermcs

Police are investigating the deaths of two Russian oligarchs who were found dead alongside their wives and children one day apart in their luxury homes in Moscow and Spain.

Vladislav Avayev, the former vice president of Gazprombank, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his Moscow apartment on Monday, according to Russia's TASS news agency.

Investigators have reportedly said their main theory is that Avayev shot his wife and daughter, and then himself.

Avayev, 51, his wife Yelena, 47, and their 13-year-old daughter Maria were found with gunshot wounds in the Russian capital.

They were discovered by Avayev's 26-year-old daughter Anastasia after she was unable to contact them, police spokeswoman Yulia Ivanova told state-owned new agency TASS.

The door of the 14th floor apartment is said to have been locked from the inside, with officials suspecting a murder-suicide. They believe Avayev's wife and daughter were shot before he was.

Anastasia told officers she found a gun in her father's hand.

The following day another oligarch, Sergei Protosenya, was found hanged in Spain with his wife and daughter stabbed to death, according to Spanish media.

Read more: Huge fire at 'top secret' Russian defence HQ leaves five dead and 30 wounded

Read more: Putin abandons plan to attack final Mariupol stronghold and declares 'victory' in city

Their bodies were found Tuesday reportedly with a bloodstained knife and an axe at his side.

Protosenya was the former vice president and chief accountant of Novatek, a major gas company with close connections to Gazprombank who boasted a fortune of over £333million.

Protosenya his wife, and his daughter, were staying in a rented luxury mansion in Lloret de Mar for the Easter period, according to Spanish news outlet Telecinco.

Natalia and Maria are thought to have been been hacked to death in their beds with an axe, according to reports.

Police were alerted to the deaths when the oligarch's son, who was in France, raised the alarm after nobody picked up the phone, Telecinco reported.

Officers checked on the villa and found Protosenya dead outside the home.

Police in the region have confirmed they are investigating the deaths, they said in a statement: "Police officers from the Generalitat-Mossos d'Esquadra of the Criminal Investigation Division (DIC) of the Girona Police Region are investigating the deaths of three people in a home in Lloret de Mar.

"This afternoon, [police] received a warning that the Lloret de Mar Local Police had found the body of three people in a private home in the town.

"Several police officers have moved to the scene. The DIC has opened an investigation to clarify the circumstances of the deaths."

Last month, Ukranian-born oligarch Mikhail Watford, 66, who made his fortune in oil and gas, was found dead in his mansion in Surrey.

Despite U.S. sanctions, oil traders help Russian oil reach global markets


April 22, 2022
JULIA SIMON


Activists demonstrate in front of a ship carrying Russian oil in the Baltic Sea this spring. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on Russian oil. However, most countries have not, and refineries around the world still import Russian oil.Frank Molter/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images

Since the U.S. imposed sanctions in March, American refineries have stopped welcoming tanker ships laden with Russian oil. But Russian crude exports to other parts of the world have been increasing.

The American sanctions aim to cut the hard-currency revenues that feed the Russian economy and its war effort: 36% of Russian federal budget revenues came from oil and gas last year, according to Russia's Finance Ministry. But while the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia have formal embargoes, most countries around the world don't, and oil refineries from India to Spain are still purchasing Russian crude.

A drop-off in Russian oil exports was minimal and has strongly rebounded in April, despite fears of supply shortages driving recent high oil prices, says Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler, a data analytics firm. Russia has earned more than $12 billion from oil exports since its invasion of Ukraine, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an international research group. A month into the U.S.-led sanctions, the flow of Russian petroleum to the world, as well as the revenues from it, remains strong.

Much of this oil trade is facilitated by a highly efficient and sometimes controversial group of middlemen: oil trading firms. Oil traders act as global matchmakers between the countries and companies that pump oil and the refineries that process crude into gasoline and other fuels.

"We're merchants," says Saad Rahim, chief economist of Trafigura, a commodity trading firm that handles about 7 million barrels of oil and products a day. "In a sense, it's the oldest business in the world."

Trafigura is one of a handful of companies in Switzerland that handles about a quarter of the world's oil each day. For decades, these firms have sourced much of their oil from Russia. About 80% of Russian commodities are traded in Switzerland, according to a 2021 report from the Swiss Embassy in Moscow. Some oil traders also have stakes in Russia's state oil company and its assets, including in a megaproject in an environmentally fragile part of the Russian Arctic.

In the weeks following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, many trading firms have said they are reviewing their holdings in Russia. Yet traders continue to facilitate the flow of Russian oil and, last month, even increased their Russian oil trading activity, says Oliver Classen, spokesperson for Public Eye, a commodity trading watchdog group in Switzerland.

"We're just looking at data that suggests that key traders working out of Switzerland have significantly stepped up their activities in the war month of March," Classen says.

Some of the trading firms that handle the most Russian oil say they're legally bound to fulfill preexisting contracts to lift Russian crude and are complying with all sanctions. Trafigura and the commodity trading firm Gunvor tell NPR that they condemn the war in Ukraine. Another trader, Glencore, directed NPR to its website, where it also condemns the war. The firm Vitol announced last week that it would stop trading Russian oil by the end of this year.

But for now, the traders' continued loadings have big implications for Russia's ability to wage war in Ukraine, says Alexandra Gillies, an adviser at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, an organization focused on extractive industries.

"In this situation," Gillies says, "they're offering a financial lifeline to Vladimir Putin and his government."

March was busy for traders loading Russian crude

The International Energy Agency has predicted that starting this month, global markets could lose as much as 3 million barrels a day of Russian oil because of sanctions and skittish buyers. The European Union says it is considering oil sanctions. But with the current limited sanctions led by the U.S. in place, oil traders in London and Geneva tell NPR that while some Russian crude is getting rerouted, so far the majority of cargoes are making their way to market.

Traders manage a complex global web of oil, says Giacomo Luciani, an energy economist and professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, or Sciences Po. "They're middlemen, so their job consists in matching the most appropriate crude with the most appropriate refinery," he says. Crude oil varies based on qualities such as weight and sulfur content. "It's like wine. Each crude oil is different."

Across the supply chain, traders are valued for their logistical know-how. "They do not own tankers, but they know where the tankers are, they know how to rent a tanker," Luciani says.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, these trading companies have been putting their know-how to work to help keep oil flowing out of Russia. A recent report from Reuters using shipping data shows that March was Trafigura's busiest month of loading cargoes of Russian oil since June 2021. Vitol maintained about the same level of Russian cargoes in March as it did in January and February, and both these companies are still lining up tankers to lift Russian oil this month and next, according to Reuters.

Rahim, of Trafigura, says because the traders aren't sending Russian oil to the U.S. or other countries that have sanctioned Russian oil, their business is legal. "The barrels are not sanctioned that any of the trading houses are touching today," Rahim says. "We have to ensure that that flow continues."
Commodity traders have a checkered history

For decades, the commodity traders in Switzerland have been deeply intertwined with Russia, Luciani says.

Gunvor was co-founded by Putin ally Gennady Timchenko. He sold his Gunvor shares in 2014, just before the U.S. placed sanctions on him following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Gunvor has a minority, noncontrolling stake in an oil products terminal on the Baltic Sea. A Gunvor spokesperson said in an email to NPR, "The terminal is being reviewed for divestiture."

Vitol and Trafigura each have minority stakes in state oil producer Rosneft's Vostok Oil project in the Russian Arctic. Both companies have announced that they are reviewing their stakes.

Glencore, which owns a small stake in Rosneft as well as a part of a Russian state aluminum project, says on its website that "there is no realistic way to exit these stakes in the current environment."

Litasco, a Swiss oil trading company owned by Russian state oil company Lukoil, and Petraco, a Swiss trader that also has contracts for Russian production, did not reply to requests for comment.

Indian refiner Bharat Petroleum Corp. has bought millions of barrels of Russian oil through Trafigura since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to Reuters. Trafigura is among several traders that handle about a quarter of the world's oil daily.Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images

But the traders' ties to Putin's Russia only add to persistent ethical questions that have long haunted the industry, going back to the so-called godfather of oil trading, Marc Rich. Rich, the founder of Glencore, was a notorious sanctions-buster, trading oil with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iran and apartheid South Africa. He was indicted in the 1980s for tax evasion, wire fraud and other crimes, and he fled to Switzerland.

In recent years, commodity trading companies have faced renewed scrutiny for their oil deals. In 2020, Vitol admitted to paying billions of dollars in bribes for oil contracts in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico, and it paid over $135 million to resolve a U.S. Justice Department probe. In 2019, Swiss courts found Gunvor criminally liable for bribery in oil deals in the Republic of Congo and Ivory Coast. Glencore is currently involved in corruption probes in the U.S., the U.K. and Brazil, and it has set aside $1.5 billion for settlements this year for what its chief executive has described as historic misconduct. Brazilian authorities have named Trafigura in investigations into oil deals, but the company denies the allegations.

Rahim says new transparency measures around payments to foreign governments and a move away from agents have changed the culture of the trading industry: "People probably who were in this industry even in the early 2000s would probably not recognize kind of how it is today."

As for the current limited sanctions on Russian oil, Rahim says trading firms are constantly monitoring new regulations to figure out what is allowable. "Across the physical trading houses, I'll tell you that probably the busiest people at those companies are the people in compliance right now," he says.
"A duty of care"

For oil traders, Russia is a key, and not easily replaceable, source in global energy markets. At the recent FT Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland, CEOs of Vitol and Gunvor said that Russia supplies about half of Europe's diesel. Europe now faces diesel shortages, and Rahim says if trading firms were to suddenly stop handling Russian barrels, there would be many more energy shortages all around the world. "We have sort of a, almost a duty of care to make sure that the system maintains itself," he says.

In late March, the economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote a letter to the heads of Vitol, Trafigura, Glencore and Gunvor. According to the Financial Times, which first reported the letter, Oleg Ustenko asked the companies to stop trading Russian energy products, which are financing Putin's invasion.

For the trading companies, it is getting harder to find ships willing to pick up cargoes of Russian crude and find banks to provide letters of credit. But while Vitol has announced its plans to stop trading Russian oil by the end of the year, for now it and other key traders are continuing to operate in Russian ports. A Trafigura spokesperson told NPR that the company expects to load lower volumes after May 15. Trading arms of international oil companies like Shell and TotalEnergies also still have long-term contracts to lift Russian oil.

Gillies, of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, says leaving the oil traders to make their own decisions about pulling out of Russia is a mistake. "Commodity traders for years have shown a willingness to do business with almost everybody," Gillies says. "And so it's not an ideal situation to have these commodity trading companies making those policy decisions about whether they should be continuing to buy Russian oil or not."

"These are some of the most economically important transactions to the Russian state right now," she adds, "so any steps to make those transactions more difficult, I think, is really important."

The intersectionality of 'Afro-feminisms' with professor Rama Salla Dieng

Issued on: 22/04/2022 - 

06:50 PERSPECTIVE 

© FRANCE 24
By:Erin Ogunkeye

It's a controversial question, especially in France: do feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ movements fall under the general scope of universalism? Or should they be broken down into smaller sub-movements to better address the intersectional nature of oppression? In her latest book "African Feminisms", University of Edinburgh professor Rama Salla Dieng considers what it means to be a feminist specifically in Africa, through a series of interviews with activists across the continent. She joined us for Perspective.

How France’s Mainstream Normalized the Far Right

Marine Le Pen is often credited with mainstreaming her far-right party. But it isn’t just that she’s moderated its positions — it’s that the radicalization of establishment conservatives has made her seem less extreme by comparison.
Marine Le Pen waves to her supporters at the end of her electoral campaign rally on April 14, 2022 in Avignon, France. (Chesnot / Getty Images)

BY THÉO AIOLFI

JACOBIN

04.22.2022

The first round of France’s presidential elections cleared the dust of an intense campaign: ultimately, as the polls had promised for years, Emmanuel Macron will again face Marine Le Pen in this Sunday’s runoff vote. As in 2017, the first round produced a close race, with the radical left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon less than 1 percent behind his far-right rival Le Pen. But even a surprise breakthrough for Mélenchon would not have concealed a major development: never has the far right been so electorally powerful in France. Beyond the conflict between the rival strategies of Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, discussed previously at Jacobin, this mainstreaming of far-right forces also owes to a radicalization of the wider political field.

In this article, I will start by discussing the radicalization of the mainstream-conservative Les Républicains (LR). One of postwar France’s two main parties, its base is today divided between Macron and the far right. Here, I will explain how successive French governments, particularly since Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency from 2007–12, have enabled and contributed to a mainstreaming of such forces’ ideology. In this sense, we can also see that Le Pen and Zemmour’s rival strategies and candidacies are also complementary. While competition may undermine their short-term chances, it benefits the spread of far-right ideas in the long run.

Bankrupt

While Zemmour’s campaign initially weakened Le Pen’s hegemony over the far right, the party which suffered the most from his bid was undoubtedly LR. Its candidate Valérie Pécresse hit a historic low, on less than 5 percent support — humiliatingly falling short of the threshold for getting her campaign costs reimbursed.

The center-right party, in different guises, the dominant player of the Fifth Republic created in 1958, is now torn in two opposite directions. On the one hand, Macron’s hegemony over the center and his increasingly right-wing policies during his presidency have attracted a substantial share of not only LR voters but also of its key figures. In spite of his promise ahead of the 2017 election to transcend the left/right cleavage, Macron offered the Right the lion’s share of control in his governments by appointing former LR members to the most prominent roles such as prime minister (Édouard Philippe and then Jean Castex), economy minister (Bruno Le Maire), and interior minister (Gérald Darmanin). This has forced LR to shift further to the Right to remain a distinctive political offer, emphasizing its conservatism while progressively abandoning its liberalism.

On the other hand, LR has been forced to reassert its difference with Le Pen’s increasingly normalized Rassemblement National (RN) and to defend the imperviousness of its boundary with the far right. While Le Pen never managed to breach this boundary, Zemmour and his open call for the “union des droites” (union of the right-wings) has shown its fragility.

During the campaign, Zemmour only managed to attract one prominent figure from LR, its former deputy leader Guillaume Peltier. His loss has been played down by his peers given that his political journey started in the youth section of the Front National (FN) and later with former leading cadre Bruno Mégret. But outside of party defections, the influence of far-right ideology can be felt deep within LR, as demonstrated by the success of Éric Ciotti, who led the party’s primary before ultimately being defeated by Pécresse and a coalition of moderates. Ciotti, who explicitly called Zemmour “a friend,” has embraced most of the themes of the far right, from defense of “Christian civilization” to criticism of “mass immigration.” His second place in the primary forced the more centrist Pécresse to shift her program further to the Right to accommodate her popular rival.

Éric Zemmour and Éric Ciotti during the Nice book festival in 2015 . (@ECiotti / Twitter)

From Sarkozy to Macron

While this mainstreaming of the far right is thus the result of years of normalization from the Le Pen camp and of the resilience of the “union of the right-wings” strategy, which Zemmour now embodies, it also owes much to other politicians and parties who have progressively adopted the themes and vocabulary of the far-right. Indeed, since the 1980s, mainstream parties have offered increased visibility to xenophobic rhetoric, either by implicitly acknowledging that the far right offers “bad answers to good questions,” as Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius put it in 1984, or by explicitly adopting it, like Jacques Chirac did in 1991 as he mocked the “noise and smell” of immigrant families during his tenure as mayor of Paris.

The major turning point in this mainstreaming was, however, Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency. His 2007 campaign substantially legitimized the far right’s agenda by adopting its hard stance on security and immigration. While it temporarily neutralized the far right’s vote, it set off the conservative right on a slippery slope by giving increased visibility to such forces’ ideology. Sarkozy’s position — promoted by his influential advisor Patrick Buisson, who later joined Zemmour’s team — encouraged the emergence of strands within LR such as “la droite forte” (the strong right) or “la droite décomplexée” (the uninhibited right).

The influence of this hard line within LR has increased over the years, as Sarkozy acquired an aura as a model to aspire to, as the most recent president from his party. Unsurprisingly, in an attempt to ensure the electorate of her “pro-security” credentials, Pécresse’s 2022 campaign spoke of “bringing back the Kärcher” — a reference to Sarkozy’s memorable 2005 promise to “clean the French suburbs with a Kärcher,” referring to a type of pressure washer.

Beyond LR, this mainstreaming of far-right themes has progressed under Socialist and liberal governments. In 2015, the shock of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terror attacks encouraged then-president François Hollande to grant a prominent role to security, patriotism, and identity. This was most visible in the rise of Manuel Valls, a figure on the right of the Socialist Party (PS), nominated as Hollande’s interior minister and later prime minister. He defended a controversial bill whereby terrorist suspects could be stripped of their citizenship (“déchéance de nationalité”), creating a rift in PS ranks as it demonstrated the increasing power of far-right ideas even on the mainstream center-left.Macron’s interior minister made headlines for accusing Le Pen of having grown ‘a little soft on Islam.’

Albeit elected on a promise of calming tensions, Macron followed a similar pattern of mainstreaming the far right with the nomination of Gérald Darmanin, a former protégé of Sarkozy, as interior minister. Darmanin made headlines for accusing Le Pen of having grown “a little soft on Islam” in February 2021, as she conceded that she herself could have written his book called “Le Séparatisme islamiste” (“Islamist separatism”).

It is worth dwelling on the central importance Macron’s government attributed to this fight against Islamic “separatismm,” a euphemistic reinterpretation of the far right concept of “communautarism” which implies that Muslim people voluntarily refuse to be part of the French society and remain secluded within their community. For this also proves that this mainstreaming goes beyond Darmanin alone. Even though Macron himself has carefully avoided employing far-right rhetoric, the members of his government have not.

In March 2021, higher education minister Frédérique Vidal accused French academia of being “plagued by Islamo-Leftism,” a far-right conspiratorial term alleging that left-wing intellectuals and politicians are complacent about radical Islam. In January 2022, this argument was pushed even further by Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, who organized a pseudo-academic colloquium on “wokisme.” This bogeyman “ideology,” which originated in far-right circles, conflates a heterogeneous set of phenomena and concepts — intersectionality, cancel culture, inclusive writing, and gender deconstruction — deemed threatening to French universalism.

Despite his claims that he has never “banalized” its ideas, Macron thus followed in a long line of French politicians who enabled the far right by simultaneously claiming to fight them and legitimizing their talking points. It is useful for Macron to cast himself as the only alternative to fascism: it silences internal debates within his camp and completely sidelines left-wing alternatives from public debate. This led to an incremental rightward shift in the “Overton window” of French politics, with once-unthinkable or taboo ideas becoming acceptable through successive exposure and normalization in the public debate. Understood in this light, the electoral popularity of Le Pen and Zemmour is only the most visible symptom of a much deeper mainstreaming of the far right.

More Similarities Than Differences

In two previous articles, I explored the background and current position of the two most prominent far-right figures in 2022, Le Pen and Zemmour. Contrasting their ideology and style offers multiple lessons about what they stand for and where they differ. Although I have emphasized their differences to develop a nuanced perspective on their current success, it is important to reassert how much overlap there is between them, both ideologically and stylistically.

Ideologically, even though Le Pen softened her stance and introduced a number of social policies to her agenda, both politicians remain deeply committed to the core tenets of exclusionary nationalism: the primacy of the interests of the French nation over everything else, a closed definition of who belongs to the nation (even if Le Pen shifted more toward cultural criteria than Zemmour, whose vision is explicitly ethnic), a promise to drastically limit immigration, the strengthening of the privileges of French citizens over their foreign counterparts, a tough stance on security issues, and a commitment to a form of economic protectionism.Macron followed in a long line of French politicians who enabled the far right by simultaneously claiming to fight them and legitimizing their talking points.

Stylistically, the three core features of the populist style explained in the previous articles helps illuminate the differences and similarities between the two candidates. In this academic approach, grounded in the works of Ernesto Laclau and Benjamin Moffitt, populism is understood as a political style, an open-ended repertoire of political performances relying on three main elements: 1) the articulation of politics as an antagonism between “the people,” embodied by a populist leader, and the elite; 2) the transgression of political norms to appear more authentic and subversive than other politicians; 3) the performative representation of society as undergoing a life-threatening crisis that requires urgent intervention.

Despite the different emphases that each of these three features has in their respective ways of doing politics, both Zemmour and Le Pen relied on all of them during their 2022 campaign. Indeed, it was noteworthy to see Zemmour introducing the people/elite antagonism to his rhetoric during his first campaign rally in Villepinte, where he directly mentioned the French people eighteen times and framed it in opposition with “the elite,” “the system,” and even an elusive “they,” mentioned fifty-two times, that “hate [Zemmour] because they hate you.”

Likewise, although Zemmour’s controversial claims made Le Pen’s own transgressions appear tame in comparison, she continued to break various political norms. In her first large rally in Reims, she used a highly emotional storytelling approach, depicting herself as the victim of “persecution” in her youth and as a resilient fighter. This appeal to the emotions — emphasizing how she had been betrayed by her niece Marion Maréchal and fellow party members who rallied to Zemmour — sought to provide her persona a more “authentic” twist. Moreover, her occasional use of informal expressions, as she did in a recent televised interview, demonstrates the development of a softer transgressive strategy; one which relies on Zemmour’s controversies to doing the symbolic heavy lifting, while she still stands out from other mainstream politicians.

From Rivalry to Complementarity

So, ultimately, Le Pen and Zemmour are playing the very same political game slightly differently. Outside of the short-term rivalry opposing them for this election — apparently a sign of divisions on the far right — they ultimately occupy complementary roles in popularizing its ideas, strengthening their camp in the long run.

The results of the first round saw Le Pen strengthened, asserting her dominance over Zemmour (23 and 7 percent, respectively). Their diverging scores partly owed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which tremendously increased the importance of foreign affairs to the campaign. While both were initially weakened by their more (Zemmour) or less (Le Pen) open support for Vladimir Putin’s autocratic presidency, they radically differed in their reaction to the situation.

Faithful to his reputation as an unwavering ideologue, Zemmour chose to remain committed to some of his praise for Putin and played down the Russian aggression. Le Pen was pragmatic, and gave a much more explicit condemnation of the Russian invasion, while sweeping under the rug her reliance on Russian funding for her 2017 campaign. Moreover, where Zemmour made the safe bet on the tried-and-tested themes of security and immigration, Le Pen wisely chose to diversify her profile by emphasizing her image as the candidate that will defend French people from increases in the cost of living.

But regardless of their relative fortunes, the fact that a far-right candidate once again reached the second round illustrates this political camp’s powerful electoral appeal. More than that, the far right’s real victory lies in its ability to have shaped the political agenda so profoundly. Although economic issues and foreign affairs imposed themselves, far-right themes of identity, security, and immigration have held an increasingly prominent role during this campaign, which forced other candidates to take a stand on these issues. Even in a period marked by urgent crises around the environment, economic inequality and public health, these themes have struggled to shape the political debate, faced with the dominance of the far-right narrative that the most urgent crisis France faces owes to immigration and the loss of sovereignty.

Equally telling was the fact that their political rivals explicitly used their concepts: Pécresse herself repeatedly mentioned the conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement” and the notion of “Français de papier” (“paper French”) in her speeches. Even Macron himself increasingly shifted to the Right for his program — so much so that LR accused him of plagiarism — which shows the limits of attempting to sell a centrist program in a context of right-wing dominance. Electorally speaking, the divide between Le Pen’s “front populaire populiste” and Zemmour’s “union of the right-wings” are not so much opposed as complementary. In its own way, each of these strategies consolidates and extends the appeal of far-right ideas toward a different part of the electorate.Although economic issues and foreign affairs imposed themselves, far-right themes of identity, security, and immigration have held an increasingly prominent role during this campaign.

This is notably reflected geographically when considering the two main strongholds of the far right in France. On the one hand, many locations in the South of France support the traditionalist line embodied by Zemmour which aims to convince the bourgeois electorate of the conservative LR to join them on the promise of a stricter stance on security and Islam. On the other hand, Le Pen’s modernist line has proven most successful in the North-East of France and in some of the overseas territories, like Mayotte, where her appeal to working-class voters disappointed by the Socialist Party is grounded in a hybrid combination of social policies and a firm opposition to immigration.

While large cities remain the biggest hurdle for either line within the far right, this heterogenous combination of voters demonstrates the increasingly solid entrenchment of their ideas. As such, these combined forces constitute not only a challenge to the old mainstream parties, but also to the emerging challengers in French politics like Macron’s liberal La République en Marche or radical left parties like Mélenchon’s France Insoumise.

The main lesson of this campaign for those fighting for progressive, ecological, and socialist causes, is that its far-right enemies are no monolithic whole. Just like every other political camp, the far rght is a complex ecosystem with conflicting yet overlapping interests. It is essential to understand the current power dynamic in order to adjust responses and counterstrategies to whatever line currently holds more traction. Furthermore, to get a holistic perspective of the far right’s appeal, it is important to engage not only with what they say, but also how they say it. Ideology and style matter in politics — and we only get half of the story if either of these things is overlooked. Likewise, a successful counterstrategy must learn from both of these components and consider the form as well as the substance of its political offer.

Yet, even such a nuanced approach also has to contextualize actors like Le Pen and Zemmour within the wider developments in French politics. Situating them as part of a broader mainstreaming of their ideas helps understand that one cannot defeat the far-right electorally by emulating their ideas or letting its representatives dictate the political agenda. Even short-term electoral victories like the ones achieved by Sarkozy or Macron become long-term losses, as the political field is incrementally pushed to the Right, forcing politicians to constantly readjust their rhetoric accordingly.

If the Left wants to challenge the far right’s cultural hegemony in French public discourse, it needs to develop a relatable and engaging narrative of its own — and consider how it articulates it.

Théo Aiolfi is a political scientist and Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, England.